Business Intelligence, analytic applications and performance management software taken as a group advanced more than 13 percent worldwide to some $10.5 billion in 2010, fueled by an improving economy, federal stimulus backing and new product releases, according to researcher Gartner Inc.

Vendors SAP AG, Oracle Corp., IBM Corp., and Microsoft Corp. command nearly 60 percent of the worldwide market, according to Gartners data. The researcher said that the steady consolidation of the market by the leading players has been offset slightly by a new wave of nimble data discovery tools and analytic applications gaining popularity in smaller business units.

In 2010, the global resurgence from stimulus packages, general improvement in the macro-economy, and new product releases contributed to a surge in BI software spending, said Dan Sommer, Gartner principal research analyst.

BI spending has far surpassed IT budget growth overall for several years, and it is clear that BI continues to be a technology at the center of information-driven initiatives in organizations, he said. Vendors aggressively market their capabilities in this area, so revenue growth is as much a function of vendor push as a demand pull.

Gartner said that the tactical buying of smaller projects prominent in 2009, which benefitted open source sales and data discovery vendors, gave way to larger, scalable projects in 2010 with the associated bump to vendors that can handle bigger deals.

In the combined business intelligence, analytic applications and performance management market, SAP remained the global market leader with $2.4 billion in sales for 23 percent of the segment. Oracle followed with $1.6 billion in revenue for about 16 percent of the market. SAS Institute, with $1.4 billion in sales at 13 percent, IBM with $1.2 billion for 12 percent and Microsoft with $913 million for 9 percent, comprised the segment leaders.

"In 2009, the difficult environment forced companies to focus on the 'bread and butter' BI projects they had already started, hence, upgrades in the more-maintenance-heavy BI platform segment took priority and grew faster, while sales of CPM and analytic applications suffered, said Sommer. In 2010, packaged application functionality returned in a big way," he said.